The Stockholm syndrome is a psychological response sometimes seen in a hostage, in which the hostage exhibits seeming loyalty to the hostage-taker, in spite of the danger (or at least risk) the hostage has been put in.

· Millionaire heiress Patty Hearst, after having been kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army in February 1974, helped rob a bank with the group two months later. She was arrested in September 1975, and her unsuccessful legal defense was that she suffered from Stockholm Syndrome and was coerced into aiding the SLA. She was convicted and imprisoned for her actions in the robbery, though her sentence was commuted in February 1979 by President Jimmy Carter, and she received a Presidential pardon from Bill Clinton in January2001.· Elizabeth Smart, a girl kidnapped and sexually abused by a mentally ill man who treated her as his wife in 2002-2003; Smart spent many months living on the streets of Salt Lake City, Utah with her captors, physically unrestrained.· Japanese abducted to North Korea during the late 1970's and early 1980's. After five of them were allowed to return to Japan in October 2002, they exhibited behavior of submission to the North Korean regime and, given that the regime would not allow their North Korean-born children to join them in Japan right away, attempted to go back there to join them; however, their Japanese families, seeing this as symptoms of brainwashing, restrained them, and eventually the former abductees shed their North Korean identities symbolically by shedding the pins with pictures of previous dictator Kim Il Sung on them during a press conference and denouncing the North Korean regime as a "criminal state" in subsequent interviews, which eventually led to the release of their children in 2004.

Incidence

According to the FBI, 92 percent of hostages in the FBI's database were reported to show no signs of Stockholm Syndrome (PDF).Outside of the criminal context, a form of the syndrome may take place in military basic training, in which "training is a mildly traumatic experience intended to produce a bond", with the goal of forming military units which will remain loyal to each other even in life-threatening situations.Similarly, the effects of the "hazing" system of induction into groups such as fraternities and sororities have been compared to the syndrome. In cultural anthropology a similar symptom is common to bride capture situations.Loyalty to a more powerful abuser — in spite of the danger that this loyalty puts the victim in — is common among victims of domestic abuse (battered wives) and child abuse (dependent children). In many instances the victims choose to remain loyal to their abuser, and choose not to leave him or her, even when they are offered a safe placement in foster homes or safe houses. This syndrome was described by psychoanalysts of the object relations theory school (see Fairbairn) as the phenomenon of psychological identification with the more powerful abuser.

Popular culture references

Film, television, and video games

· Buffalo '66· Matlock: The Kidnapping· Dog Day Afternoon (based on a true story)· The World Is Not Enough (a James Bond film)· Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst· In Die Hard, a doctor appearing on a television show describes an identical phenomenon known as "Helsinki Syndrome". The bumbling host says this refers to "Helsinki, Sweden", and the doctor corrects him, saying "Finland".· In Metal Gear Solid, Solid Snake refers to his companions attraction to terrorist "Sniper Wolf" as Stockholm syndrome.· CSI Miami, episode 13, season 3: Rex Linn starring as Detective Frank Tripp suggests the case at hand might be an example of the Stockholm syndrome.· In "Truth or Consequences, N.M. (1997)" a couple played by Kevin Pollak and Kim Dickens is taken hostages by Vincent Gallo and Keifer Sutherland. He begins to be friends with them, while she gets outraged by his behavior.· Nip/Tuck, episode 3.14 (Cherry Peck). Kimber Henry shows signs of Stockholm syndrome after ostensibly sympathizing with The Carver after he kidnapped and tortured her.

"stockholm. SPEECH TO WORKING-CLASS ACTORS ON THE ART OF OBSERVATION. on the occasion of a meeting to discuss the foudation of an amateur theatre group for social-democratic trade unions. brooded over the GOOD PERSON. how can luxury be brought into the parable? and how to avoid the impression of a milkmaid's accounts. the calculated must be paired with the dainty. the girl must be a big powerful person. the city must be a big, dusty uninhabitable place. the drawback is too much action. no room for digression and detour. so everything is much too rationalised. dramatic taylorism. some attention must be paid to countering the risk of chinoiserie. the vision is of a chinese city's outskirts with cement works and so on. there are still gods around but aeroplanes have come in. perhaps the lover should be an unemployed pilot?"Bertold Brecht - may 39, whitsun

1." We talked later, between silences, about conversation, and about its likeness to scientific research: about both of them being deeds of motion along an unlit corridor in which a participant will bang first against one wall and then against the other. Looking for something and finding something else. Research being an activity without company. Godard both defends and possibly regrets his isolation, but he would fight to the death for the right to solitude, which is something different. "Solitude is a strong position. The position to refuse." He contests by silence, just as his silence also expresses the courtesy of declining to waste someone else´s time. So we began to talk about noise. Not sound but noise. His films have more and more often provoked thought about the intrusion of noise. "I am very interested in noise", he said. "Even when a small blade of grass is growing, there is a noise between the grass and the earth. Ah, I can ask you about something." He left the desk where he was sitting, and went to get a brochure, which he found in a second. "What is souffle in English?" I suggested a translation that was electronically wrong, and he got a technical dictionary. "It´s 'hum'."(..) "A souffle, which is a low-volume noise - which can, of course, be talk about, shall we say, a cup of coffee - is diagnosed here as 'a leakage between two channels.' There was an article in Scientific American by an expert on modern communications. (..) A signal between the transmitter and the receiver goes through a channel and noise is added, he wrote. A matter of signals. Conversation between intimates: a leakage between two channels." Like the films he makes. Semaphore signs, emblems sighted from far away, seepages of talk. "A film is an image on an image on an image. The images will say 'I love you', then 'I don´t love you', then 'I love you' again, but in a quite different way. This can be done without universities, without expensive equipment. Universities are depressing. Equipment leads to control by the rich owners of the equipment. A film should build images in a way that is quite different from TV. Television is a looking machine. The killings of people on TV don't have the effect the assassins want." (..) "I hate the theatre. Perhaps because actors are shouting. Or because they are serfs. I prefer sport, which is a more free kind of theatre. I prefer the Olympic Games." "Penelope Gilliatt

2."Gideon Bachmann: The sound engineers, for example? You pay ever more attention to sound now.Jean-Luc Godard: I have allways paid considerable attention to the sound track; I think we were among the first to use direct sound. I stopped going to Italian films, in fact, when I found out, by filming in Italy, that nobody there recorded the sound at all and they make it all up later. Mind you, there is a great musical tradition in Italy, which makes it all even more ridiculous. I don't think there should be a conflict between the sound and the image. (..) If you take Alexander Nevsky by Eisenstein, for example, the battle scenes, these were first written in the form of a score by Prokofiev and this gave Eisenstein ideas; he had the score changed and then they shot the scenes in accordance with the music they had worked on together. My film has much less ambition, but three-quartes of the scenes in my film were also made in this way. For example, the attack on the bank came to be after I heard a certain part of the 10th Quartet and I understood, since I was planning this film, in which there was to be a crime element, I understood that Carmen could in fact be part of a small gang, and so then came the idea that Don José is a policeman, and in this way we came back to the real story of Carmen. The music has a certain control over the images, and there are places in the film where the scenes become a bit autonomous or simplistic or even vulgar, like in a few of the love scenes between the protagonists, and then the music comes and takes over as if it were saying, "Come on, let's go, let's go on, this is serious..." Everybody knows this, it has been said again and again, and not only about Carmen, music announces the events ["la musique annonce les evenements"], it presages history, and even people like Mitterand's adviser know this, and if the politicians would only listen to the music of the people, they might know better what goes on. So I don´t thnk that what I am doing with sound is new, I think I have always paid as much attention to it and given it great importance. I find myself, in fact, being quite original in what I do, and maybe alone. For example, all my films since Sauve qui peut have only two mixing tracks. You know, in the cinema, when it comes to making up the final sound track, there are always many original tapes - the sound of a car arriving at the beach, for example, the voices of the actors getting out of it and saying "I love you" or the opposite, the sound of the waves behind them, maybe a cock crowing in a nearby farm, and some music. That makes five tracks... and I have only two hands to manipulate them... if I had only one arm, maybe I'd have only a single sound track. All this business of having the various sounds marching up in front of you like soldiers is called mixing and I can only control it with the two hands I have. ""G.B.: The attempt to find out how far one can go in breaking down the traditional ways of making films here carries Godard to self-imposed extremes: He says, for example, that he can use only two sound tracks because he has only two hands. So, when the two tracks are taken up by music and the sound of the waves, there is no track for dialogue and the actors mouth their lines in silence. And mixing is against his grain, too, so sounds (including musical cadences) stop and start in the middle. Not to speak of the disconnectedness of images long his trademark. "Gideon Bachamann/Jean-Luc Godard

3."Dubbing? I hate it. I think it is only in rich countries that films are dubbed. In underdeveloped countries they are not.Sometimes I think dubbing or subtitles are not so good. For instance, they showed Blow Up on the plane from New York, and I looked at it without the earphones. It was much more beautiful silent."

"No, sound is not a complement of the image. Well, maybe sometimes - but maybe sometimes the image is only the complement of sound. And maybe sometimes they are both together. When you are speaking now, your face is very synchronous to your language. I see no difference. (..) Sound is not a language. Sound is everything. A picture can go without any images on the screen for some time - just sound. Or only with silent images. It depends on what you want to tell. It's only a matter of technique."

"I think in Bresson´s meaning, "écritu" has more value than just shooting a movie. For Bresson - who is very much Catholic - when he uses the word "écritu", which means "writing" instead of "shooting", it's a bit as if someone were entering into a religion. It's a matter of austere investigation and examination. I think that's waht he means. His technique is very severe and very painful, and it's not a method usually considered when people are speaking of movies. So he says "écritu". It's like when you speak of music - very often you say "writing". Bresson often compares what he is doing in movies with what other people are doing in music. To him a movie is just like music. And when he says I'm writing my movie, it's just like The Beatles or Mozart when they say I'm writing music."

"And what I wanted was to have what I would call "fundamental" music. I wanted music which had marked the history of music itself, both its practice and theory (..) music which stand for all the theory and all the practice of music which has so far existed, and which gives work to all the musicians of past and present throughout history."Jean-Luc Godard

"there are concepts which are difficult to defend because they spread such boredom whenever they arise. like DÉCADENCE. there is naturally such a thing as the literature of the decline of a class. in it the class loses its serene certainty, its calm self-confidence, it conceals its difficulties, it gets bogged down in detail, it becomes parasitically culinary, etc. but the very works which identify its decline as a decline can scarcely be classed as decadent. but that is how the declining class views them."Bertold Brecht - 24 jul 38

"We feel that we have very little to say to each other. Nevertheless, we are in a system, a star system - this is a temple of culture, we are the big priests, and you are, I don't know what... or I do know what you are. The real contradiction, and we can't resolve it, is that we have nothing to say to each other, and here we are in front of each other dying to say something, and the only game we know is the question and answer game. I don't know how to deal with it any more, but we still deal with it. We just fell obliged to stay because of the money."

"I see no difference between the theater and movies. It is all theater. It is simply a matter of understanding what theater means. That is not generally understood. I mean, what do you call the place where a movie is seen if it is not a theater?"

"I'm sorry, I can't answer that question because I see no difference between the concrete and the abstract."

"Before I was an amateur in a professional system. Now I'm a professional in an amateur system."

"Because if the French New Wave was powerful, it was because it was only four people or four kids who were talking to each other. Every time there is a new movement in cinema (...) it only lasts two or three years... The people involved were not yet established directors. They were not afraid to talk to each other about what they were doing. Today, they are afraid."

"I have a strong need in my work to be criticized and to know where I was wrong or right, but with evidence. I'm afraid to be the only judge of my own picture. I need to be criticized, but with good evidence. If I were to commit a crime I would need evidence from you proving whether or not I had a reason to commit the crime. I read the review you did of my last picture, but I don't care whether you like it or not, I want the evidence."

"I'm very solitary, that's all - I can't dismiss it. Inside, I'm very much in communication with a lot of people and things who absolutely don't know I'm in communication with them."

" i am now 36 years old and i have not wasted these years; i am entitled to say this, the more so if i think of the efforts i have made rather than of my achievements, and if i plead in extenuation that i live in times where it is not only easy to waste time, but one is also robbed of it. i haven´t lived for myself, but in the public arena, for from the age of 21 i have been known for my literary works and for many enterprises connected with them. i have moreover already attracted followers, and i have advised and given a lead to others. i merely mention this to lend some weight to my statement that i don´t know everything about life. (...) i have arranged advantageous contracts that made possible a life that is in accord with my desires, i own houses, a motor car, i maintain a family, employ secretaries, all of this in spite of the fact that no one could call my works marketable. "Bertold Brecht - 1934

"Because for me what I do is about choice, like choosing to be an artist. On the other hand I would like to say a bit more about form, which concerns me very directly (...) but which is just as valid. And that is: when I do what I do it´s because I find it beautiful. I want to make a work that´s beautiful. It´s as simple as that. I think what is beautiful is true. It may be a simplification, but I don´t think it´s that simple to make something beautiful, and I´m also committed to making that beautiful work. I think it´s a lost cause to aspire towards beauty without total commitment: it would never be beautiful, at best only pretty."Thomas Hirschhorn